The Corporate Version of Game of Thrones

Shivaji and Ashoka were kings known for kingdoms who captured fort in the 16th century. Those were the old days. Now, things have changed. It’s all peace! Four centuries past, but, wait! We are seeing something similar. The corporates fighting out for acquisitions and amassing of businesses, companies! Welcome to the 21st century, of what I would like to call ‘Corporate Version of Game of Thrones’.

Most of the recent news in technology field is about corporate houses acquiring companies which have great technology in their bag. Google buying Moodstocks and API.AI, SalesForce buying Metaminds and Apple adding Turi to their ever growing tree. Two things are quite obvious here. One, most of them are start-ups and that is quite an astonishing trend. Astonishing! Why? The perception of top IT companies pioneering in research and innovation of tech products thinks there are some cool ideas from these start-ups that are quite amazing and conspicuously money spinners. Two, the companies feel technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, image processing are the game changers in this corporate war.

Google, SalesForce, Apple, Intel are the warriors in this battlefield. Look at the irony here! The big business houses looks at the small companies for their ideas that could flourish their big business or may be the insecurity creeps to put a full stop to the growth of these small less known enterprises. A classic example of Facebook acquiring WhatsApp, as it was a threat to Facebook’s messenger app. Well, that’s what happens in corporate field. When you have competitions, you shoot down the competitors.

The consequences are to be analysed. There are two sides to the story. Start-ups getting recognised by the Big Daddy’s of tech companies. The pitfall being the competition is between the well established organisations. New entrants, Sorry! No entry to the Big Daddy’s Club. Why has this trend taken place? It all boils down to fund supply. Financing and sponsoring of research and development on bigger technologies necessitates funding. These funding can only be provided by the bigger companies and hence the interesting trend of such acquisitions.

As mentioned at the beginning of this writing about the rulers, doesn’t this sound familiar to what we have witnessed in our history books of school days? The war without weapons, but the war for the corporate throne!